Twain's Feast (11 page)

Hot egg-bread, Southern style. Hot light-bread, Southern style. Hot corn-pone, with chitlings, Southern style. Early rose potatoes, roasted in the ashes, served hot. Fried chicken. Peach cobbler. Bacon and greens. Apple puffs. Hoe-cake. Wheat-bread.

Southern style.
Twain lived in New York and New England for as long as he did in the South. Still, he remained nearly nationalistic about Southern cooking. His menu included far more dishes cooked Southern style than any other; he wrote about those cooked at the Quarles farm with passion and love:

Like most of his contemporaries, Twain probably didn’t think much about the dishes’ origins; the very fact that they seemed so natural to the place might have prevented that. He didn’t write at any length about who exactly was doing the cooking, who it was that gave them their “main splendor.” And he didn’t muse about why it was, exactly, that these particular foods were cooked so well in the slaveholding states—and, Twain insisted,
only
there. He didn’t name the enslaved women who worked in the log kitchen, connected to the main house by a “big broad, open, but roofed passage,” or in the smokehouse behind that.

Though these women were almost certainly several generations removed from Africa, their skills—and those of millions of women like them—were anchored in the cooking and customs of their greatgrandmothers’ homelands, as surely as much of their spoken English reflected the cadences and grammar of Fulani, Ibo, Kongo, and other African languages. Rice farmers carried the knowledge of how to build dams and master coastal floods; cooks knew how to fry in oil, how to bake in ashes, how to make vegetables savory by stewing them with a little meat. Their understanding of food—the ways they used it to strengthen, comfort, and sustain their families—made Southern food splendid.

It’s hard to give a brief description of West African food without annoying people who truly know the subject. My archaeologist friend Cameron Monroe, taking me to school, says flatly that “there’s no such place as Africa.” And he’s right, in the sense that talking about “Africa” forces you to make broad and sometimes empty generalizations. Africa is just unbelievably huge; you could pretty well lose the lower forty-eight states in the Sahara, and early Portuguese, English, and Italian mapmakers used to do amazing conceptual backflips to make the continent look like something less than nearly triple the size of Europe.

Still, the cultures of sub-Saharan Western Africa share some broad culinary tendencies, just as those of Northern Europe do. These tendencies and customs were probably especially important to the first generations of enslaved Africans, who had been thrown together without sharing a language, or possibly a religion—without sharing very much at all. Cooking food in a way familiar to all those present could have signaled that they shared at least some widely dispersed customs and practices; it could have hinted at the start of a community.

Of course, the food choices of slaves were often terribly limited; the familiar would always be welcome, but it might not always be attainable. Even in rice-growing states, where the primary grain was known and loved by many recently enslaved farmers, most were given rations of less expensive corn. Where Africans had yams, there might be sweet potatoes; for millet, substitute wheat. What’s more, social conditions varied widely by region—even from one plantation to the next—so one family of slaves might have access to very different foods than those eaten by another only a few miles distant. Slaves might be given only tough, cheap cuts of meat, or else whole animals might be shared throughout the entire quarter; they might be allowed fowling pieces, or nets and traps, or forbidden from hunting at all.

But whatever they were given as provisions, whatever else they grew or trapped or hunted or scavenged, the slaves cooked food as they understood food should be cooked. And just as a language can quickly adopt new words within a slowly changing grammatical structure, particular ingredients were naturally cooked using familiar, traditional, durable skills. The fact that many West Africans made vegetable relishes—using meat more as a flavoring than a primary ingredient—then served them over cooked starches, may have been more important than whether the starch was corn, as on the Gold Coast, or yams, as among the Ibo. West African gardeners and cooks knew millet, rice, corn, yams, and manioc; they knew eggplant, peppers, okra, black-eyed peas, cowpeas, onions, and a variety of greens. Now, no matter what there was to fill it, the stewpot would keep on simmering—whether there were yams or white potatoes, roots baked on the hearth.

West Africans shared six major cooking techniques: boiling in water, steaming in leaves, frying in deep oil, toasting beside the fire, roasting over the fire, and baking in ashes. Like specific ingredients such as sesame, many of these techniques became important in the emerging food culture of the American South—a culture that drew on African and European roots and used many ingredients grown for generations by Native Americans. Within that food culture, there could still be many distinctions between place and class and race. But just as the African banjos became the heart of bluegrass music and Yoruba
to-gun
(“place of assembly”) buildings were adapted as the shotgun houses common through the Mississippi Delta, African elements were simply included, without comment, among the foundations of Southern food. The cooking on the Quarles farm was creolized to the point that both whites and blacks may have seen it, simply, as
cooking.

Twain’s menu is full of dishes with African roots. His fried chicken (perhaps the region’s single most famous dish) was cooked in deep fat, a technique used in Scotland but perhaps more common in Western Africa, where the cooking fat would have been palm oil. What’s more, the chicken was so familiar to many Africans, who raised the birds in open yards (a practice common through much of the South), that enslaved women eventually displaced white women as Virginia’s main chicken vendors. A pot of bacon and greens would be prepared more or less identically to the meat-flavored vegetable relishes of Western Africa, though with new ingredients substituted—salt pork, for instance, replacing the dried shrimp common in some African regions. Twain’s “early rose potatoes, roasted in the ashes, served hot,” also used one of the region’s most common cooking techniques. Corn pone could be substituted for simmered sorghum or millet—or might not represent a substitution at all, since maize was well known in regions like the Gold Coast (modern Ghana). And chitlins were deeply associated with slave cooking, especially after the late eighteenth century, when planters increasingly offered poor cuts instead of whole animals to be divided.

The slaves on the Quarles place might have cooked very differently than did those in other states or regions. They probably didn’t make hoppin’ John, the Carolina classic of cowpeas and rice simmered with a seasoning bone of smoked ham, possibly brought from the West Indies as
pois pigeon
(say it out loud). They wouldn’t have made gumbo like that cooked by black and white Louisianans (
gombo
was the Bantu word for the okra stewing with chicken and shrimp and spices and ground sassafras leaves). They couldn’t have cooked diamondback terrapins, like the ones roasted in the shell by slaves living close to brackish coastal marshes. They probably didn’t have Guinea hens, the African fowl still found near old Virginia and Maryland plantations, or cook much with peanuts, calling them “goobers” in a corruption of the Kongo word
nguba.

Still, many of their meals came from the same deep, African-American culinary grammar as these dishes, and that later inspired the free black cooks of Virginia’s Freetown (Edna Lewis’s evocation of Freetown in
The Taste of Country Cooking
is one of the most flatly gorgeous, inspiring visions ever written about what American food can be). Dipping a wooden spoon into a pot of savory greens, stirring up the bits of bacon and fatback, smelling to judge the “pot likker”;
³
whether cooking for themselves or for the Quarleses, the slave cooks helped to define a place over which they seemed to have little control, shaping it with their sensibilities and desires and tastes. For both blacks and whites—and certainly for Twain—their skills helped to make the South the South.

In
Was Huck Black?
Shelley Fisher Fishkin makes what is, to me, a completely convincing argument that Huck’s talk owed more to Southern black dialects than to the white, “backwoods Missouri” speech Twain mentions in the introduction to
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Food is much less important to the novel than is speech; still, Twain uses it both to mark Huck’s class and to give him a cultural bond with Jim, though it’s a bond that Huck only gradually recognizes.

In
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,
Huck had told Tom about a slave named Uncle Jake, ending with, “Sometimes I’ve set right down and eat
with
him. But you needn’t tell that. A body’s got to do things when he’s awful hungry he wouldn’t want to do as a steady thing.” Still, the foods Huck loves best are also those of the slaves. His own eponymous novel opens with him pining for a “barrel of odds and ends” in which “the things get mixed up, and the juice kinds of swaps around, and the things go better,” a cooking style that sounds a lot like the single-pot stews preferred by slaves throughout the South (the low-fired clay colonoware pots made by some slaves were most appropriate for a slow simmer). By the book’s midpoint, his reluctance to eat with a black man is completely gone. When Huck returns to the raft after escaping the stunning, casual bloodlust of the Shepherdson-Grangerford feud, it’s when he shares a meal with Jim that Huck knows he’s well and truly away—that he’s safe. “I hadn’t had a bite to eat since yesterday,” he says, “so Jim he got out some corn-dodgers, and buttermilk, and pork and cabbage, and greens—there ain’t nothing in the world so good when it’s cooked right—and whilst I eat my supper we talked and had a good time.”

It almost went without saying that Jim knew how to cook it right. Huck is enjoying a meal completely typical among both Southern African Americans and poorer whites: vegetables flavored with meat, served over or alongside a simmered or baked corn dish. Even with monumental social divisions, and great variations in ingredients and cooking technique, Southern food now had a grammar that often crossed racial lines.

The overall culinary situation on the Quarles farm was complicated—in fact, given the forces at work, it’s kind of amazing how natural it seemed to those involved. Borrowings, lendings, bleedings-together, from people originating on different continents and migrating from various regions of the country. Twain himself migrated an entire farm, when in
Huckleberry Finn
(a novel of motion, travel, and escapes) he lifted up the entire Quarles place, moved it a few hundred miles, and dropped it, now a cotton plantation, in Arkansas.

All through the day in Gillett, I get sized up; there’s a kind of basically good-natured circling that usually ends with an assertion that I stand out like . . . well, like a guy from Berkeley hanging around four boiling kettles of raccoon. Heath Long asks where I’m from by asserting that it has to be somewhere else: “I
know
you’re not from around here.” And when I start to do the list, saying I’m from Connecticut but then California and then Virginia and California again, I get no further than Connecticut before he’s breaking in again, dryly, “Never would have guessed.” Later I think I’ve scored: a farmer looks me up and down, considers, spits, and offers, “I
know
you’re not from L.A.” That’s something, I think. “Los Angeles,” I imagine, is shorthand for the farthest away you can get without leaving the continental United States; there are limits to how out of place I am here.

Then it hits me: L.A. = Lower Arkansas. Ah.

Every fifteen minutes Scott Plaice leans over a kettle, raising a piece of raccoon on a two-pronged fork. Once the meat barely slips from the bone under its own weight, the men shovel forty pounds of it into gigantic, flat-bottomed, homemade colanders. In the farm shop, Heath and his father, Billy Long, dump the steaming, diminutive shins and flanks and hindquarters across two plastic-covered tables. The men line up, pull on disposable blue gloves, and grab steak and paring knives. Then it’s all business. They hunch silently over the tables, seizing piece after piece, cutting off every bit of visible fat.